The David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation

Systems Innovation for Healthy Communities

The David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation acts to invent, catalyze and deploy breakthrough innovations as a partner in advancing the health and wellbeing of communities.

Our work leverages technology to create scalable solutions to address pressing population health challenges facing our region and our nation. Our human centered design approach ensures that we design responsive systems by engaging members of the community, external partners and members from within PAMF as co-designers and co-producers of our work.

The Innovation Center was launched in August 2010 and inspired by Dr. David Druker, the late CEO of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. While serving as CEO, Dr. Druker promoted a culture of innovation with PAMF consistently being an early adopter of new technologies and creating new ways of delivering patient-centered care. The Druker Center is continuing this early legacy of health care innovation with an extended focus on the community.

Our comprehensive approach to wellbeing focuses on the social determinants of health and gathers critical information on social, environmental and personal factors that impact quality of life for individuals and communities. The Innovation Center houses a multidisciplinary team with skills and experience in clinical practice, technology, ethnography, R&D, social sector governance and community engagement.

The Innovation Center is currently focused on two key areas of work: Our signature incubation project, linkAges, and Personalized Health Care Programs (PCHP).

linkAges: System for Successful Aging is a new, community-based, multigenerational network designed to engage and activate cross-sector engagement and existing resources within communities to improve the health and wellbeing of older adults and family caregivers, and support aging in place.

Personalized Health Care Programs are designed and deployed using methods which engage individuals in changing their behavior to improve their own health outcomes.

PAMF has a long-standing history of creating and applying health information technology innovations to management of health and disease, including use of personal health records, home monitoring and mobile health tools. Over the past ten years, PAMF has developed and deployed methods that engage individuals in processes that change their behavior by leveraging every “touch point” where there is an opportunity to impact the delivery of care. Today more than three-fourths of PAMF’s adult patients are connected online and PAMF is widely recognized as a leading source of community health education throughout the region.

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linkAges TimeBank

Innovation Center History

Dr. David Druker, the late CEO of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) believed that innovation is what defined PAMF. We launched the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation in 2010 to expand on his vision of exploring, creating and deploying new ways to advance the health and wellbeing of people in our communities.
Innovation is at the center of our transformative programs, which impact everyone in our rapidly-changing health care system.